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Why Use Google Analytics To Help With Your Content Marketing

Hi there. Today we’re going to be looking at using Google Analytics to help improve your own content marketing efforts. But before we get into that, a quick question. When it comes to your own content marketing efforts, how are you reporting on it? Are you using a variety of platforms and software? If you are, think about the following questions. How much is it costing you? Are you getting the right source of metrics? And how long is it taking you to compile that data and that information?

Because the good news is that Google Analytics is free. You can get a lot of data, and it’s very quick and easy to use and set up. And that’s what we’re going to look at today. We’re going to look at a top-level overview of the different things that you can look at.

Now here at Koozai we split that into metrics and KPIs, and insight and data. Now the way that we get our metrics and KPIs is that we set up custom reports, and the way that we get our insight data is we set up custom dashboards. For more information on any of that, please get in touch and we can speak to you and consult with you on how to set those up.

But today let’s start with just that top level overview of the types of things that you can look at. So the best place to start in terms of your own content marketing efforts and reporting on it is referring site data and referral traffic to content. Now there’s a fundamental difference between the two.

The top one referring site data really refers to any content that you’ve produced that’s actually offsite, offsite of the site that you’re looking to promote and optimise. So let’s say that could be a guest contribution. It could be a press release that you’ve pushed out. It could be any kind of PR outreach. And what you effectively want to do is you want to see the amount of traffic that’s driving from those pieces of content towards your site. Referring site data does that.

In addition, referral traffic to content actually looks at the pieces of content you’ve created on site and where and which the traffic from various others sites is directed towards that content. So you’re looking for links and traffic.

In addition to those two metrics, we have visits and goals. This is one of the key fundamental goals that you want to be looking at when it comes to your own content marketing efforts. Basically, visits it stands to reason is basically how many visits you get to your particular piece of content. But by setting up goals you’re actually able to look at how that piece of content has contributed towards an action. Now those actions could be something like setting up or downloading a white paper, email signups. It could be a contact us form submission, that type of thing.

The beauty of this is this can all be set up within Google Analytics. So at the start of the campaign just make sure that you’ve got a good overview of the types of things and the goals that you want to be achieving through the content that you’re creating.

Now likewise, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, you can set up e-commerce tracking to help deliver and help understand more information on what your content is doing and how it’s achieving those goals, those e-commerce goals that you’ve set up. You’re able to actually create and give a monetary value to the pieces of content that you’ve created. You can actually do that with goals themselves. You can establish a monetary value to let’s say what a contact us form submission would cost. However, it’s only as accurate as the data that you’re willing to put into it. It’s only as accurate as let’s say a contact us form submission you’ve put a value of say five pounds towards that. It’s as accurate as that.

Whereas e-commerce tracking and e-commerce goals actually give you the full monetary value of any transaction placed on that site through your content. That is really effective and very, very good for you to be able to report on when it comes to reporting internally or to your clients.

Page flow is effectively treating your piece of content as the first landing page, and what it then tells you is where the user goes on afterwards, after they’ve hit that page and they’ve landed on that piece of content. The reverse of that is the reverse goal path. So what this does is it actually shows you what the end goal was, and actually looks at where your piece of content has contributed within that user journey.

So all this information, which is free and available within Google Analytics, helps to give you fantastic reporting methods when it comes to showcasing this either internally or towards your clients.

In addition to this and these custom reports that we’ve set up, we have customised dashboards. These dashboards tell us a rich amount of data and insight, and it helps us to tweak and develop our content marketing pieces and strategy so that we’re able to enhance them and really help optimise and attain these key performance metrics.

So the way in which we do this is we report on some of the following. Social stats. This basically tells us how popular each piece of content is, and not only that, it tells us which sites that it’s most popular on, so which social platform it’s most popular on.

From this data, we are able to decipher and establish the ways in which we want to create content moving forward. So it might be that a particular piece actually works really well on Twitter, whereas another piece might just work well on Google+. And again, it gives us that insight and that deeper level of understanding of what we’re doing and how we can help promote and push our content to achieve these metrics.

Time on page is another fantastic insight. So with this data what we can see is if we’ve written and created a really long piece of content, that it would take any normal human being 5 to 10 minutes to read, if we noticed that the time on page is only a very short time, so let’s say something like 30 seconds, we know that we need to go back into that content to tweak it to keep people actively engaged with that piece of content.

Bounce rate and exit rate, Quite similar, but do have a key fundamental difference. The bounce rate treats your piece of content as the first landing page. Now we find that with blog content and so on and so forth the bounce rates are generally quite high. But what we can do is, if a piece of content actually has a very high bounce rate, but we actually want the intended purpose of that piece for users to actually read and travel further within the site, deeper within the site either to a product page or a service page. Again, we can see the bounce rate. If it’s high, we can go back into the content and see what we’re doing wrong. Are there enough call to actions? Are there enough links to those products and those services or other pieces of content?

Now exit rate treats your piece of content as the last page within a user journey. Very much in the same way that we would look at bounce rate to tweak our content, again we would look looking at exit rate to tweak our content. If we’re not satisfied that the last piece of content that people see is the content that we’ve created and we actually want people to move on further within the user journey, again we will look at the piece and establish whether there are enough call to actions and links to other pieces of content.

Then finally, we have some really cool key demographic and fantastic resourceful information on location, demographics, and device. Now what this basically tells us is, it stands to reason, location, demographics, and device, but let me give you some examples. So if we have a client that we’re working on or you guys are working on a business that’s operating within, let’s say, the Birmingham area, but you actually find that there’s a huge demand and less traffic towards your content from, let’s say, the London area, what this enables you to do is actually give you an idea of how to kind of diversify and actually create content specific to other areas.

And likewise demographics, you might have a nice clear idea of who your target audience is. Right at the start of the strategy phase you might have done your buyer personas and your target audience research. But what demographics actually does is it tells you things like age. It tells you gender. It tells you interests, and you might unearth a complete new target audience that are actually interested in your content.

Then finally device. Not only does this tell you things like whether they are using a tablet or a desktop or a laptop or a smartphone, it actually drills down and tells you the make and model of a particular smartphone or tablet. That’s quite detailed information. But in any case, just to know that more people are actually accessing your data or your content through smartphones and tablets, it might make you want to think about how you actually create that content and how well that content is visible on those devices.

So that just gives you a top level overview, as I mentioned before, the insights that we get and how we can report on metrics and KPIs.

If there’s anything you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment below. And that leaves me just to say thank you very much for watching. For more information, please visit our social profiles coming up now.

Content Marketing Manager, James Perrin is a regular contributor to the Koozai blog. Well experienced in sales and marketing, James also has a passion for journalism and media, especially new media. From the latest industry related new stories to copywriting advice, James will provide you with plenty of digital marketing information.

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